Disasterous Problem Maya 2011

[nameless0ne]

I have a shot that that was near done with full animation, when the rig suddenly returned to the T pose at the scene’s origin. The problem repeats itself on multiple computers, for nearly all save iterations, which leads me to believe there is a problem with the rig reference. While the rig does not show any keys it is my guess the key data is preserved somewhere within the scene file, and when I load up the list of reference edits for the rig’s RN there are hundreds of failed set attr commands that I think is the key frame data failing to connect to the rig’s controllers. The failed edits appear to be a range, the controller and then values. They look like this:

 setAttr 1 20 .T:turt_r_knee_anim.translateX 1 21

 If anyone has any idea of how we can salvage the scene without simply starting over that would be amazing and I’d be ever so grateful. Thanks!

[joojaa]

Well ok the lesson you should learn from this is  that you should never work in serial, but rather you should always render out parts of already completed scenes incrementally this way you can never loose the whole work. So never expect the next step to work, so never think i do this and then that. Allways keep testing the next step while your working on step 1.

Easiest solution is often to just bake all animation down to either deformer level or point level and use that baked stuff as a render target, unreference everything and so on. Its a commonly used practice to avoid having dependency since the render stage IS final and you dont really need to burden the renderer with the details. (this is also one reason one uses stuff like mentalray standalone since in essence exporting to that allays makes your problem flattened)

[martin-freitag]

Hey Greg H,

to me it sounds like the rig was updated or has changed somehow in a way that the names of your controllers changed and maya can't attatch the right animation curves to the handles anymore. Maybe you changed the prefix for all controllers. If the rig is referenced and animation allready startet renaming the controllers in the rig file will kill your animation. What you can do: rollback the rig to an earlier stage, before the renaming.

The reference edit setAttr has nothing to do with animation its just about setting one value on an attribut (like a pose) without keying the attribute. You should watch out for connectAttr edits. You also can check the outliner for your lost functioncurves. Tunr Off "Show DAG Objects Only" then you should be able to find the unconnected animamationCurves (they have an icon looking like a grapheditor with some blue and yellow functionCurves). They have its names according to the attributes they where connected with, i.e.: T:turt_r_knee_anim.translateX should have been connected with T:turt_r_knee_anim_translateX animCurve ..so you may be able to see what namechange happend in the rig.... if that is the problem.

If that was not the problem and the names are still right you might be able to reconnect the animationCurves via name and a smart script  so T:turt_r_knee_anim_translateX.output  will be connected to T:turt_r_knee_anim.translateX, T:turt_r_knee_anim_translateY.output to T:turt_r_knee_anim.translateY and so on...

good luck...

[jan-ace]

Hey Greg,

You might also want to check the trax editor. Maybe someone excedentally disabled the animation layers in the editor and then only the default pose is shown.
(the same goes for the normal animation layers. Maybe there is an animation layer that is disabled at the moment. )

However this does not explain the connection errors. If you are working with the trax editor then you also have a character set which might be renamed. Other than that check the explanation from martin freitag if you are lucky you can still find the animationCurves.

Good luck.

[nameless0ne]

Martin,

Thank you so much, with your help we were able to salvage 99% of the animation.  Still not sure why the problem occurred since we could fin no change in naming conventions between rig versions.  However we found the animation curves in the outliner, and by comparing properly connected animation curves in the hypergraph we figured out that the T: curves were connected to a placeholder within the reference node, while working animation curves were connected through the rig charSets and out to the controllers.  So we wrote a script to collect, tokenize, recontrusct the names of everything getting a source and target allowing us to run a scipt to reconnect them giving us pretty much all of the animation back.  Thanks again, not sure if our problem was the exact one you described but you gave us what we needed to solve it. 

Greg